[joshuacc]

“firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.”

That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.

[UncleMeat]

My experience with these sorts of layoffs is that they are not tightly bound to performance. If you have underperformers you can fire them the ordinary way.

[Covenant0028]

Exactly. How is it that an org suddenly discovered thousands of employees are under performers? And how is it that the number of under performers coincides with the number McKinsey and Co (or similar company) said it would be?

[threetonesun]

At this point I would not be surprised if there isn't an "AI" tool that looks across employees by salary range, department earnings, seniority and age and just generates a list at a moments notice. I was around for a desperate layoff at a small company in the early 2ks and got to watch as management basically ran around the office doing this logic in real time. Some people are get pulled in because they aren't high performing or they're unliked, but most was a simple expense/income calculation.

[stego-tech]

Literally this. Corporations are good at making up plausible excuses, but anyone who takes more than two seconds to evaluate their claims beyond face value will find they’re almost always complete bullshit.

Underperformers should be rotated out long before a mass layoff occurs. If your company isn’t axing them until a mass layoff, they’re doing bad business.

[ajsnigrutin]

This, plus companies do different stuff. If eg. amazons streaming service fails, but normal sales of physical items surge and in total, compensate to make a profit, you can't really move streaming developers, marketers etc. to warehouse jobs.